A few hours after I arrive at Hôtel Belles Rives in the south of France this summer, I’m seated at dinner when I see a flash of green light ricochet across the glittering water. It’s almost too perfect.

I’ve come here to visit the places that inspired the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald as he traveled across France with his wife and daughter in the 1920s. I’ve ended up in a scene from his most famous novel. In The Great Gatsby , the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock shines green, entrancing Gatsby. I’m staring at a pinprick of a lighthouse in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea while a glass of vermentino sweats on the table in front of me, but still. I’m entranced.

“Almost too perfect” is close to how Fitzgerald must have found this place. Long ago, he rented the house that becam

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